MMOs and game design

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Links for the Summer’s end

Hope you all are having a good weekend. It actually isn’t raining here which is astounding because it is both August Bank Holiday and Festival weekend (I’m not going this year but can hear it from my house).

Brian Crecente@Kotaku enjoyed trying Diablo III’s witch doctor at Gamescom, but wonders how much of that is down to nostalgia. Do we like games because they’re good or because they remind us of other games we used to like?

Kinless is getting conflicted signals from Blizzard. On the one hand they encourage alts (heirloom gear, new classes) but on the other hand … where are the new character slots? Do Blizzard love alts or hate them?

There are a few games in open beta at the moment. Julian@Kill Ten Rats asks whether Open Betas really work as beta tests.

Romantic subplots in games like Mass Effect and KOTOR are not without their critics. I have said before that it felt to me like ‘select the right options and get the girl’. Kotaku points to an article on gamecritic.com by Alex Raymond who argues that games present a model where sex is given out as a reward (just like epics), not shown as part of an ongoing relationship.

Tobold gets some interactive drama going with his readers, otherwise known as the Is he? (Gevlon) or Isn’t he? dance. Personally I’m so happy to get any comments at all that I’m not inclined to mess with people’s heads just for the sake of it … or am I?

Blogs about new games

There were a lot of announcements about new games during cons recently, and we’re not done yet. If you want to follow the news about an upcoming game, why not subscribe to one of the blogs and let someone else do the work? 🙂

3 thoughts on “Links for the Summer’s end”

Unfortunately I don’t get the bank holiday off work tomorrow which is a shame 😦

Molyneux’s idea is pretty interesting but I’m not sure I buy it. You only need to look at WAR and see if that the evil side was hugely more popular than the good. I’m not sure he’s really basing his idea of any solid facts.

Regarding the sim aspect of MMOs and not getting focussed on achievements and the like, the original version of SWG before all the CU and NGE killed the game’s souls was brilliant. I played on the US server Starsider which was labelled during beta as the non-official RP server (SOE didn’t do RP servers). It was amazing, OK there was still the combat and doing missions side of thing but due to the sandbox nature of the game, the tie-in with Star Wars, player housing etc… you really did feel a part of the worl, especially as a part of the RP scene. I hav efond memories of going to parties, hosting some of them myself and being around people who also wanted that immersion. It’s the pinnacle of my MMO history.